Introductory remarks

Let's play with language, and in particular, metaphor, as
Harry Huebner did in his Christian Education: The Question
of Engagement. Just what kind of metaphor should a reviewer
use to guide and manifest his thoughts on paper regarding
Huebner's address? Here is a sample: review as constructive
critique, review as meant to advance the search for Truth,
review as critical engagement, review as exegesis, review as
morality play, review as academic exercise, review as
process, review as re-creation.

While each of these has its appeal, I tend to favor the
review as re-creation and review as meant to advance the
search for Truth. But I shall also endeavor to use the
review as critical engagement, given the persuasiveness, in
general, of Huebner's remarks regarding its usefulness in
bringing together faith and learning (or teaching). It
remains to be seen, of course, just how useful the selection
of these three metaphors will be to accomplishing the more
specific purposes of this review.

These more specific purposes relate to bringing out some of
the areas of agreement, along with some of the areas of
disagreement and why. But most importantly, I would like to
scrutinize the possible implications of Huebner's position
of "Critical Engagement" for the importance of resolving
several crucial issues in the philosophy of religion. In
fact, these issues may ultimately need resolution if
Huebner's position is to be persuasive for persons from
different religious faith traditions. Using the review as
re-creation metaphor, let me now first clarify at least one
of the descriptive meanings of Huebner's position. Whether
it is "good" I leave the reader to judge. Whether it is
"correct" is another question.

Harry Huebner's position on 'Critical Engagement' in brief

Upon first hearing Huebner's remarks I must confess that I
experienced no real need to take issue, not even to quibble,
at least on several of the themes - nay on his overall
framework! Indeed, as Huebner seems to appreciate, many of
the problems of realizing one's faith in a teaching
profession are inter-related.

What is it that Mennonite college and university professors
need to do within the context of the academy? Huebner
exhorts us to consider the descriptive phrase, train a
people. Indeed, it is not just educating individuals who are
smart, ethical, good writers and speakers, etc., that the
Christian - especially Mennonite Christian - professor needs
to do, it is helping to mold the consciousness of a people -
that is, the consciousness of Mennonites themselves as
Mennonites. For Huebner, I think, the deep values making up
the faith must be presented in such a way as to be taken on
by the young individuals of the faith.

How are the distinctive values of this consciousness to be
presented in the academy? Huebner realizes the importance of
showing that faith-consciousness is not something that is
just discussed, but lived out on a day to day basis. So what
is called for is to train by example - example of the faith,
based in the faith, manifesting the faith. Thus, Huebner
exhorts Mennonite professors to teach in a way that is
invitational, non-violent, and confessional. This is one
part of Huebner's interpretation of the consciousness of the
Mennonite people as it is played out within the context of
the academy that I found quite persuasive. Just the respect
that it pays to the importance of free choice on the part of
the learner in the learning process is noteworthy.

More than this, Huebner instructs, is letting the faith -
what you know and understand of the message of the
enculturated Jesus Christ - arbitrate your articulation of
the vision of your discipline to your students.
"Enculturated" is a very important quality of Jesus Christ,
according to Huebner. It is clear that such a quality makes
the Christ - the Deity in some sense - like us in very
crucial ways. These ways are crucial for answering a number
of questions: How to teach our disciplines, how to conduct
ourselves with integrity in everyday life, how to
acknowledge mistakes and ask for forgiveness, how to follow
the Master when the way becomes dark, how to save ourselves.

Indeed, one of the more intriguing aspects of Huebner's
presentation was its touching on numerous contexts and
levels of life, all of which comprise the backdrop of one's
teaching life, creating a variety of challenges but also
providing enrichment. How to teach one's discipline as a
Mennonite Christian professor becomes a way to ask, of
course, how can one best do the Church's work? But other
questions are no less important within the broader context
of salvation: How does one understand a student's problems
learning the subject matter? How should one's discipline be
best represented? How should one's scholarship interact with
one's classroom? How should one's compassion for oneself and
the student as sinful, needy, and imperfect creatures, be
tempered with the knowledge of the virtue and excellence of
which we have shown ourselves capable? How should our
knowledge of our own inherent fallibility be tempered with
the demands that the pursuit of excellence and all its
progeny puts upon us? Perhaps the only way that such
questions can be adequately addressed, Huebner might be
willing to argue, is through the adoption of the metaphor of
critical engagement.

In short, Harry Huebner, in his deliberate and thoughtful
essay has offered a provocative and telling challenge to the
Christian College community on just how the difference that
being a faculty member in a Mennonite college or university
should have on how a particular discipline is taught gets
framed. Huebner's erudite and rather wide-ranging address
tackles this problem head-on, adopting a metaphor of
'critical engagement' which he believes helps to delineate
the interaction between faith and learning in a way that
stretches the mind with not only integrity but Christian
integrity - and especially when considering the pedagogical
attitude of the teacher that he proposes - Mennonite
Christian integrity as well.

However, just how successful he is, is not entirely clear.
Overall the piece is complexly structured yet accessible. He
has much of interest to say about language, the Mennonite
heritage, popular culture, both contemporary models of
teaching and those from antiquity, metaphors of engagement.
He addresses important issues, e.g., the appropriate role of
humankind and mind in doing the work of the Mennonite
college or university, the different ways of discipling and
which are best, etc. And indeed, the address goes somewhere,
suggesting plausible practices for a Mennonite professor to
engage in the classroom, and reasonable curricular changes
for a Mennonite college or university to consider. However,
the piece does not ultimately address what it needs to, to
get its point(s) across convincingly. A big part of the
problem may be a certain ambiguity about three deep issues
that have sparked the imagination of philosophers and
theologians for a long time, and issues that eventually need
to be addressed if Huebner's position is going to pass
muster. In my final set of remarks I aim to adopt and use
not only the metaphor of review as critical engagement, but
also review as meant to advance the search for truth, as the
three issues are introduced and clarifying remarks made.

On critically engaging Huebner's position

On Reason and Revelation. It is certainly a metaphor that he
used himself, engaging critically the enlightenment figures
and their over-emphasis, at least according to Huebner, on
humankind being the measure of all things, and on the
supremacy of the mind. I had a real strong sense of him
critically engaging me at this point! I remember thinking to
myself that the mind cannot be dispensed with to the degree
that Huebner is apparently wont to do. Mind in both its pure
or formal sense, and informal sense too, is crucial to
faith! And for better or for worse, humankind may need to
acknowledge its inevitable mark on and in everything for
which they may claim the sacred! Now the puzzling thing is
that Huebner does as much as acknowledge this in his opening
pages regarding language and humanity being inextricably
intertwined. He also does it in a more subtle way some pages
later when he clarifies the enculturated nature - essential
nature - of Jesus Christ, indeed, the enculturated -
historied - nature of humanity. What I think is at stake in
this conceptual confusion is not only different uses of the
terms humanness and mind, but the issue regarding the proper
relationship between Reason and Revelation. I will deal with
the second item only.

As far as I can determine Huebner attempts to resolve the
issue in favor of Revelation over Reason, with his battering
of William of Ockham, Descartes, and Kant, along with his
constantly alluding to humankind's fallibility. I think that
this is a mistake! At some point Reason (or mind) has to
mediate just which understanding of faith is best, on the
basis of some principle of rationality: consistency,
coherence, integrity, etc. But these are principles which go
beyond the mere content of Reason, however well that content
seems to be justified, and upon which Revelation may not
have any real effect. In fact I would wager that it is our
adherence to these principles that gets us beyond an initial
mystification with Revelation, or with scripture, for that
matter! Indeed, it will be Reason on a daily basis, and not
Revelation, that gets us closer and closer to understanding
the full meaning of God.

Of course, our particular faith understandings need periodic
comparison with scripture, and indeed under these
conditions, what appeared reasonable previously, no longer
does. However, in this case, a distinction must be made
between the content and the structure or process of Reason.
Clearly, the content of Reason, what is actually believed,
needs scrutiny. But leave Reason qua Reason alone! Kant was
not completely misguided in his discoursing on pure Reason.
Indeed Thomas Nagel, a contemporary philosopher of Reason,
is not misguided either, and he wants to place Reason at the
very foundation of morality!

However, I would not advocate Reason over Revelation, in
general. Perhaps there is some justification in looking at
Reason and Revelation, in all of their senses, in a tight -
interdependent - interplay. Clearly such a conception can be
shown to have some of its foundation in Descartes with his
similar view of the relationship between mind or soul and
God, although space limitations does not permit elucidation.
Conceiving of it in this way has implications for our
understanding of the interaction between faith and learning:
They may be equal players on the field of life given their
twin arbiters of Reason and Revelation.

On the inerrancy of scripture. Training a whole people in
what it means to be a member of a faith tradition and what
it means to be a professional in a specific discipline, is a
daunting task, as Huebner acknowledges. Of course, as I can
determine both directly and indirectly from his address, the
importance of looking to scripture to know how to teach a
discipline from the perspective of faith, cannot be
underestimated. But these written and recorded statements of
the faith are tentative, incomplete, and in many cases
mystifying views of who God is and what is desired for us,
as I am sure Huebner would agree. Indeed, what is left to
sway in Huebner's critical wind is the way scripture should
be taken: literally, figuratively, both, neither, something
else again? How this question is answered has implications
for how a particular discipline is approached from the
perspective of faith. With a literal reading of scripture,
some disciplines are in direct irreconcilable conflict
(e.g., evolutionary biology, or geology) while others seem
almost beside the point - of scripture at least (e.g.,
micro-computer electronics, aviation engineering).

Even more important than leaving a discipline bereft of
faith-based interpretations, inerrancy leaves whole
religions and their denominations - many peoples and their
ways of life - out of relationship with God! And I doubt
that such intolerance, not to mention exclusion, is part of
what Huebner envisions when he thinks about the Mennonite
college or university of the 21st. century.

Some of the problem may have to do with our definition of
inerrancy. To be sure part of its appeal may be its
underlining the ultimate truth of God and God's plan as
clearly and indisputably revealed in the only writings we
have. But to take scripture literally - at least across the
board - is problematic not just for the reasons identified
above, but given that scripture has been strained through
the very human lenses of the gospel writers, not to mention
the very human institution of the early Christian church.
Could we keep the idea of ultimate truth without the
exclusionary consequences by arguing to disassociate the
concept of inerrancy from the literally true? Could the
bible be inerrant, but more figuratively than literally so?

On the concept of God. Ultimately, Huebner uses critical
engagement as he admonishes Mennonite Christian faculty to
acknowledge their ungiftedness, their students'
ungiftedness, at least in terms of such gifts they do
possess making them strive to be the best or one of the
best. Such an exhortation against this entrenched Western
culturally-founded dictum prepares the way for acknowledging
the importance of accepting one's creaturely limits, and the
implications this has for what to do with the God-given
gifts that are possessed. One consequence may be the need to
construct a whole new perspective on gift-having, -giving,
and -receiving. If such a perspective is appreciated, then
such gifts can be re-given and re-received, in the academy,
time and time again.

Now in order to construct this perspective, it seems to me
that two rather difficult -to-reconcile ideas have to be
reconciled: one is God as omni, the other is God as relater.
God is omni - the one who knows everything, who is in
control of everything, and thus we need to recognize this
and take our rightful role as follower. Wouldn't Huebner
agree? However, he took quite a few paragraphs to let us
know how detrimental the idea of a perfect God was. Of
course, emulating such perfection leads us down the wrong
path, and interferes with emulating God as relater. Indeed,
we are told by Huebner of the importance of that old
conception of the Lord as one who gives and receives gifts.
But Huebner cannot have it both ways - or can he? I think
that what needs attention is just what kind of God we are
worshiping. What kind of concept of God can we embrace? What
does our understanding of scripture now, along with what
experience has shown us, and our developing facility at
applying Reason - purely and practically - displayed, about
the changes in this concept that should be made? If God
represents perfection and gifting (as is found to be the
case not just in philosophical and theological treatises,
but in scripture as well) then why should we be all that
surprised that God's creatures want to emulate their deity
in both of these ways? Our concept of God and the way we
translate it into everyday life needs continued attention!

Just as Huebner's address has made clear to me the
importance of continuing to work on such weighty topics as
Reason and Revelation, and the Inerrancy of Scripture, it
has also brought me up close and personal to perhaps the
most important growing edge of theology of all: the concept
of God. Gordon Kaufman has worked on this concept, but
remains, I think, more impressed with the ineffability than
with the effability of God. Huebner has likewise revealed a
rather deep but different mystery about our understanding of
God, another kind of paradox, if you will, but one that may
yet be resolved. Who knows? Perhaps what we will find as a
fruit of our theological labor is a new conception of the
Deity which gives rise to a new conception of faith and
learning, one that subsumes and brings together human
aspirations and divine qualities - to be perfect - or
rather, excellent, and to be in giving relationship, or
rather loving. If we could actually enact these qualities in
our day-to-day teaching life, what more could we ask of
ourselves?

Paul T. Lewis

Paul T. Lewis is professor of psychology and chair of the philosophy department at Bethel College.